The Soloist

Excerpted from the novel

He looks almost always for only the best climbers. The lost but unfound, the rare empty caskets. Of those few, more often than not, three or five or maybe ten years later, some hiker will slip off a trail and fall into a web of bones and sinew. But still, some of the best are never found, and he imagines that’s what brought them to Yosemite.

The rumor began with an article in Climbing magazine, or it started with a bad joke at the Balentine Competition. These two sources are the earliest Jude can come up with in terms of documented evidence, as genesis, but in truth he thinks the source of the rumors began more as a subtle human tide, a gentle lean that rippled across the country. There was an article about ice climbing in the Antarctic, and it mentioned the Air Force jocks who would fly low and slow over the penguin fields and the penguins would look up, higher and higher, leaning further backwards to track the object until, breaking sudden as a wave, acres and acres and acres of penguins fell like dominoes, changing the ground from black to white. This is how he pictures the beginning: a slow swell that birthed with deceptive suddenness, already a full-grown religion.

“You got everything?” Bates William asks.

“It’s too dark to tell what I forgot,” Jude says. There is the whisper of Bates’ shoes against packed earth and he follows the sound. “I remembered the rope, so no worries there at least.”

The country had witnessed the climbing world change before when, with better equipment and training, climbers leapt past 5.9s to climbs that were previously unimaginable. In the early sixties, John Gill free-soloed a short 5.12a, inventing nearly everything he was doing. And then, in the early nineties, a slew of free-soloists he inspired died off until only one remained. As if, when the first one fell, they broke the collective concentration of an age. For awhile there had been an article a day on Don Davits, the lone survivor, waiting to see how long it might be until he joined his brethren. Jude was only sixteen then and remembers feeling that intake of air, that swell of chest in the face of a long tunnel. But Davits lived.

The Soloists. It’s a name that appeared everywhere simultaneously and, for the most part, described only a glimpse, or a scuffed hold on an impossible climb.

One blog publishes a list of potential Soloists, climbers on the verge of greatness or climbers recently disappeared – the exact methodology is indecipherable. At the other side of the spectrum are Web sites that disdain the competitions and the idea of Soloists. Climbing magazine suggested this is why the Soloists go into hiding. Rock & Ice had one piece with an unattributed quote implying that it isn’t privacy but disillusionment that forces them underground. ESPN runs whatever’s shocking, a sort of sports tabloid when it comes to climbing, but occasionally adds footage to a known story – Lyn Michaels’ solo fall from Half Dome defined an entire decade of climbing in thirty-two seconds. The video just long enough to scar a generation.

It’s a still night, and the smell of dust comes from Bates in front of him. The grasshoppers are silent this deep in the night, but now and again he hears the whir of one jumping out of their path.

There are many theories on the Soloists and Jude mulls his own while feeling his way along the trail: If someone sacrificed their whole life, everything they had, to be just a little better, a little better than anyone had ever been – what would that look like?

Only once every few months does someone think to remind everyone that the Soloists, in fact, could be contemporary sports’ “cold-fusion moment” – a false promise debunked after years of hope. This from an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Bates stops in front of him and Jude bumps against his pack. In this light, looking up at the wall, he can barely make out the quick draws clicked into the pro they left yesterday.

“You want to take the first shot?” Jude asks.

Bates laughs, drops his pack. In the pre-dawn darkness he’s nearly invisible. “Honestly, Jude? After last weekend, I’m not sure I trust you to stay awake at belay.”

Jude nods and realizes it’s a wasted gesture in the dark. He thinks of the competition climbers, hopping from one sponsored event to the next, who hit only the newest routes, trying to scrape clean a new 5.14 and stick their name on it like some comet or newfound element. And then there are those who work only at dawn, away from the lens that might make them famous, pendulum them into sponsorship range. Jude’s internal clock has changed over the last twelve months to accommodate this new schedule, and these days he can feel nine p.m. coming like a weight on his eyelids.

Jude cups his hands and blows warm air through his fingers, rubbing his palms together. The biggest problem with climbing this early, he thinks, is that it’s cold.

A dozen climbers gone in less than so many months, at least six of them renowned. Blinky Berkowicz he’d seen himself, working this same area. She was more than competent. Another handful of serious climbers claimed suddenly to be retired. Some of them could’ve retired, some dead, but doesn’t it seem like too many?

“Hey,” Bates says. “Someone last night was saying that Liz Vickery’s gone missing.”

Jude stops. “Really?”

Bates says nothing in return, but even in the darkness Jude can feel his sleepy shrug. So many climbers, so much history and progress. And then suddenly, nothing. There are new 5.14s here and there, some beautiful climbs, sure. But a decade has passed without a revolution. The pressure of progress is building, as if against tectonic plates, and soon, he hopes: the quake.

“Belay on,” Bates says, and Jude feels that caffeine tickle in his limbs, the tick of grin at his mouth which he’s seen in pictures of himself on the rock, and the next thing he knows his feet are off the ground and he’s moving. They’ve been working this climb for days and he knows the first sixty feet by touch. •